In emerging wireless communication concepts (e.g. the 5th generation cellular communication standard advocated by the Third Generation Partnership Project—3GPP), one application considers support of machine-type communication (MTC). A MTC device may typically transmit small amounts of data at each transmission occasion and the transmission occasions may be quite rare.
According to some scenarios, the support for MTC should provide for radio resource management that allows coexistence between different classes of applications, for example, applications with sporadic, small amounts of MTC data along with applications with real-time data.
Also typically, a MTC device may be a low cost device, which may entail that it cannot support all requirements of some wireless communication standards. For example, UMTS-LTE (Universal Mobile Telecommunication Standard, Long Term Evolution) is designed for broadband data rates (>10 Mb/s) and correspondingly applies wide spectrums for communication, which may not be possible to support with a low cost modem.
Thus, there is a need for methods and devices that enable accommodation of MTC devices in coexistence with broadband communication.
A possible solution comprises providing a separate (narrow) spectrum for MTC. However, this may not be a spectrum efficient solution, especially during introduction and ramp-up of MTC when the number of MTC devices will be rather low, since the separate spectrum (which could otherwise be used for ordinary communication) will typically not be fully exploited by the MTC.
Thus, there is a need for alternative methods and devices that enable accommodation of MTC devices in coexistence with broadband communication.